Well despite officially being night time for hamsters, Tiggy was quite active this afternoon and we thought we should take the opportunity presented to us in encouraging her out of her out of the tubing. Fortunately we’d come across some good advice that was not to give hamsters places to hide away until they’re trained. A thousand thank yous to the Hamster Central website for giving us the confidence to reconfigure the cage to a much more basic state. It was out with the house, out with the tubes and out with the log – for now – until she’s trained.

This still leaves the hamster in a far from austere cage, as there are still two levels, the wheel, chews and so on. The massive benefit is that Tiggy will now be accessible wherever she chooses to make her nest, which will in turn allow us to interact with her regularly and tame her as the days progress.

As it transpired it required some amount of contact with her to move her out of her cage while we modified it and then back in again. Fortunately we’re well prepared for such manouveurs as we have a hamster fort and a hamster enclosure fence which are ideal to place a hamster in while working on the cage. This interaction worked to our advantage as although Tiggy remained nervous, as we encouraged her in and out of her various environments she began to let us stroke her and even – briefly – hold her to place her back in her cage.

We’re certainly not there yet, however the absence of nips from the ham is a sign that if not entirely at ease she doesn’t regard us as predators either. This encounter has tired us all out, as we’ve retired to the couch while Tiggy, after a spot of running on the wheel – the first time we’ve seen her on it in days – has retired to the shady area under the first floor.

The road to training a hamster may be long but I feel there’s been a confidence boost all round and we’re now in good stead towards the goal of a happy and tamed ham.

We bought Tiggy, our new hamster, a giant cage, thinking that as a young ham she would be running about all over the place and getting into all kinds of scrapes and fixes. She has two levels, a wheel, a log with holes in it and a length of tube that takes her outside her cage and in again. She’s a very well provided-for hamster.

To begin with, she set up camp in one corner of the base level, which was okay because we could at least see her, even though she wasn’t very interactive. Dan and I have literally read every website and book on baby hamster taming we can get our hands on this week to figure out how to get our silver-haired little monkey beast not to flee us in fear – all to no avail.

Eventually, she moved herself into a blue plastic house that came with the cage. This made the situation even worse, because she then wouldn’t come out during our waking hours. We had some success on Thursday, when we moved her house (with her in it) to the base level, then took off the upper level and the cage itself and waited for her to emerge. We put fencing around the base so she couldn’t high-tail it out of Dodge when our backs were turned. We managed to get her out of the house and she did a bit of scuttling about to her water bottle and sat on the top of the base a couple of times thinking about whether to venture into the new lands below.

Then we had a bright idea. We removed the house. She has plenty of darkened space under the mezzanine level, a log and the corners to hide in, but at least we’d be able to keep an eye on her. What actually happened was that she moved wholesale into her tubing. Can’t lure her out, can’t clean her out and can’t handle her to tame her. Big fat fail.

It’s hamster night time now, so we’ll have to wait til later to see what can be done.